There are no surprises about the music chosen for Margaret Thatcher’s funeral, for clearly she and her family discussed her demise, which is all too rare due to our society’s still strong taboo about death and dying.

The former Prime Minister didn’t share this irresponsible approach to one of the most important decisions we must take, as she insisted she did not want her body to lie in state or money to be spent on a fly-past. Even if she had dismissed the idea of planning her end of life event, as a past Prime Minister she would have been leaned on to approve her funeral arrangements of which the songs and readings are hugely important elements.

Her staunch Methodism was well known and she often cited Christianity to justify her support for the market economy and capitalism. Her Methodist upbringing will thus be commemorated by Charles Wesley’s hymn Love Divine, All Loves Excelling and her patriotism by the music played at the start and end of the service by a British-only group of composers, and the last hymn, I Vow To Thee My Country.

Lady Thatcher wanted the service to be ‘framed’ by British music, hence the scores by Henry Purcell, Gustav Holst, John Ireland, Herbert Howells, Edward Elgar, Frank Bridge, Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The pieces by Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Faure and Johann Sebastian Bach are excellent choices too.

The order of service features Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality and TS Eliot’s Little Gidding.

She also decided that she was to be cremated, which is a break with tradition, and one of which we approve. We would have approved even more had she (or her family) chosen a green funeral and a woodland burial.

While not Thatcherites, most of the My Last Song team are old enough to understand her place in history and admire her courage in standing up to bullies whether the undemocratic trades union bosses holding the country to ransom or the fascist Argentinean military dictator General Galteri invading the Falklands. And on balance we agree that her funeral should reflect her place as a major figure, unlike the political pygmies that followed her as Prime Minister.

My Last Song was created to encourage and support people to plan their own or their loved ones’ funerals so they have the end of life event that best reflect their lives and values.

We have many thousand visitors every month but don’t think these include the Thatchers. Even so, it’s encouraging to know that the family’s planning of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral validates the My Last Song message. For what’s good for former Prime Ministers should be good for the rest of us too.

Barack Obama has, in his first term, been a good President dealing well if not brilliantly with the US economy and foreign affairs.

It’s been difficult to know what his Republican opponent Mitt Romney really stands for, though his economic policy is woefully unconvincing and contradictory. His foreign policy seems two generations out of date, and his defence spending pledges are unaffordable and irrelevant.

He hasn’t been able to articulate what, if anything, the Republican Party has to offer apart from not liking President Obama.

We also take seriously what the Economist magazine says:  ”Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says…not a convincing pitch for a chief executive.” We don’t think he has the right policies to guide the US out of the economic mess of the past four years.

Obama’s policies of prudent government spending and encouraging small business to take on workers is gradually pulling the US into better times. He is less in the pocket of big business and the banks that have got the US, and the rest of the western economies, into the dire financial mess from which we are slowly emerging.

My Last Song believes that America shouldn’t go in Romney’s direction of travel: taking away women’s rights to have an abortion, reducing the tax paid by the rich (and therefore making the poor pay more or reduce their benefits), ignoring the case for equal marriage, giving big business more power and privileges, being indifferent to the needs of the disadvantaged and seemingly guided by the rules of the Mormon Christian sect.

As President Obama’s instinctive sympathy and desire to help the people whose lives have been devastated by storm Sandy shows, he’s a man of the people, and we hope that the people of the US will give him another four years as President.

Islamic fundamentalists must feel their religion is very fragile if they have to kill people because it’s criticised or mocked.

Allah, via the Archangel Gabriel, told Mohammad to write in the Qur’an his rules on how Middle Eastern society 1,600 years ago should behave.

As the one God he thought people should be unquestioning of his wisdom and so deemed it right that his followers should punish those who disobey, criticise or mock his work. These days we would say Allah is a totalitarian control freak demonstrating self-doubt.

Mohammad didn’t help matters by not putting much thought into his succession…disputes between his offspring and son-in-law caused the division between Sunni’s and Shi’ites which has resulted in butchery between the two ever since.

It’s in the nature of religions to encourage fanaticism. A religion that demonstrates self doubt won’t get very far.

Those who wrote the Bible as the word of the Christian God saw the weakness of saying in effect, this is the word of God but if you want to ignore it, fine. Jews believe they are commanded to read and understand every phrase in the Torah.

Most of us find it difficult to be fanatical about something we can’t fully support, and this is what fundamentalists fear. The violent Muslim fundamentalists who killed the US ambassador to Libya and demonstrate in the streets are showing just how feeble Islam is, just as zealots of other religions demonstrate their fear that their faith might be misplaced by killing or persecuting ‘heretics’ who have the temerity to disagree with some dogmatic detail.

If extremists from any religion believed their faith had the strength to withstand critics, comics and those of other religions, they would not resort to violence and murder to defend it.

The vast majority of people who share a faith take the positive from it and ignore the dangerous. Indeed Islam went through a golden period from about 750 to the 16th century of tolerance, artistic excellence and scholarly endeavour.

But being fanatical is a dangerous consequence of a religious belief as it is sanctioned by the people who started the religions.

Paradoxically if there’s one antidote that dilutes fanaticism within the fanatic, it’s humour. So it would be a good thing for those moderates of all religions who abhor killing in the name of their faith to encourage people to laugh about it.

I laugh about religion as the alternative is to cry.

Three more British servicemen have been killed by rogue Afghanistan policemen they were ‘training’ as part of our strategy  to make the Afghan forces and police loyal to the Government and professional in the way they carry out their duties. We are told this justifies our intervention in Afghanistan in 2001.

I hope the politicians who involved the UK in Afghanistan, those that continued with this flawed foreign policy and the senior military men, either active or recently retired, who announce to the media that our strategy is paying off, sleep well at night.

I’m not sure how they can as they have sacrificed over 400 brave young lives in an excise they knew was doomed. History alone should have taught them to stay out of Afghanistan, though if they had analysed the situation in the country in 2000 the only sensible decision would have been to leave the country to sort out its own divisions and problems. The argument that by confronting the Taliban in Helmand province the streets of our cities would be made safe from Islamic terrorists is palpable nonsense.

Let’s hope that the abject defeat suffered in Iraq, the unsuccessful campaign against the Taliban (a collective noun for warlords, Islamists, bandits and nationalists) in Afghanistan and the failed and dangerous state that Libya now is – all reports show a descent into anarchy and lawless revenge killings – will stop any thought of intervention in Syria.

The situation there is desperate…it is beyond comprehension how Syrians can kill and torture fellow Syrians, how President Assad can turn his troops on his own people, how doctors turn in patients to the authorities if they have been injured while demonstrating.

But as the Russians and Chinese have argued, to use force in Syria in an attempt to bring peace will make the situation worse. Russia in particular knows first hand how the various factions are being supported by Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose enmity makes every dispute in the Middle East a war by proxy. Israel is, of course, happy to see a hostile neighbour at war with itself and will do nothing to help resolve the situation.

Add to that the febrile atmosphere of sectarian hatred: Christian against Muslim, Shia against Sunni, and the previously persecuted Alawis who now control the army and security forces determined to hang on to power at any cost. The President’s family is from the Alawite community and was from a poor background until his father rose in the military and took power in a coup in 1970.

You have only to read about the Hama massacre to know what Assad has inherited from his father and other family members.

Syria is now gripped by a civil war and the international community is unable to impose a peaceful outcome.  We will look on hopeless, horrified, depressed and desperate to alleviate the suffering. But we will also be helpless…we cannot help and to try will only make matters worse.

This morning, Dr Margaret Evison, the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan in 2009, was interviewed on The Today programme in the aftermath of the death of the six British soldiers. This brings the number of British service personnel killed in Afghanistan to 404.

Dr Evison said that when she visited the country two years ago her thinking about the cause for which her son died changed. The social pressures as well as “the revenge culture” and the physical size and layout of Afghanistan made her doubt if the war was winnable.

No war waged by foreign forces in Afghanistan is winnable. Experts in the Foreign Office will have stated this to Tony Blair and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, pointing out not just the lessons of history but that the current situation with the country divided into competing ethnic groups, tribes, warlords, bandits, Islamic extremists, run by an unpopular, ineffective and feeble central government, and with Pakistan, Iran and other neighbours intent on destabilising it would result in heavy casualties inflicted by a fanatical, invisible and, in some areas, popular force called the Taliban.

They would have told the politicians that the Taliban, the religious extremists and warlords would fight any moves to impose external values and culture with deadly effect. They would have dismissed the notion that an external force could defeat the Taliban, build a coalition to govern democratically or change a culture so embedded and so utterly different to ours.

Blair and Straw had commited to helping the US to invade Afghanistan and ignored the advice. Eleven years later and 400 plus brave, loyal and never to be forgotten deaths later (as well as thousands of innocent Afghans whose deaths have made the country’s hatred of the west far more intense) we are pulling out with our tails between our legs.

Let’s hope that our abject military and political failure in Afghanistan and the abysmal achievements of overthrowing Sadam and Gadhafi (Iraq and Libya now destined for years of bloody division, settling of scores and slaughter of innocents while Iran, Saudi and Israel fight proxy battles) prevent the west from considering any further military interventions in either Iran and Syria.

There are few certainties in politics or international affairs but the following is one of them: “The aims and objectives of external intervention in totalitarian Islamic countries will never be achieved, and instead intervention will make the situation more unstable and dangerous.”

Coffins are going through a change of image in our culture, though an understandably slow change because everything to do with the subject of death and dying is conservative, whether the funeral industry (though with notable exceptions) or our society…you’re likely to be in a group of one if you ask people at a party if they’ve thought about their coffin recently.

Risking, then, online isolation, let me point to the popularity of the display of Ghanaian and English ‘designer’ coffins at January’s South Bank exhibition on death, and also to the growing trend for decorating coffins of loved ones with bespoke designs, graffiti, illustrations, words of affection and humour, even glued on newspaper cuttings and photographs of footballers and pin ups.

I’m all for this trend as it will make people think about the choice of coffin, rather than nod through what the funeral director suggests as the price of the coffin makes up a large part of the cost of the funeral.

I’m particularly exercised by this issue because the cross on the back of Bernard’s coffin was incongruously facing an almost exclusively atheist group of mourners throughout his humanist funeral.

On a range of costs you have at one end the elaborately built coffins much loved by some Ghanaians and the wonderful Crazy Coffins, to the plain cardboard coffins that will be supplied direct to the family from companies such as Greenfield Creations.

I believe that the involvement of bereaved loved ones, or those facing bereavement, in choosing an appropriate coffin (such an eco-friendly type if the departed was concerned with the environment) and decorating it with personal images and messages, can reduce the feeling of helplessness, anxiety and anguish that death inevitably causes.

Playing a part in personalising the coffin is a way of saying that you accept death and aren’t going to collapse into grief when confronted by it. So, I’ll risk telling my friends and fellow party goers that the next time I’m involved in a funeral I’m going to decorate the coffin.

It might clear the room, but at least I’m doing my bit to change our culture. (Probably why the last time you were invited to a party was five years ago – ed.)

I saw the other day a memorial message: ‘Gran will look down on us from heaven’. It made me wonder in a semi whimsical way, Where is heaven?

It isn’t ‘up there’ in the sense that somewhere between the earth and space is a place where God looks down, angels flutter around and saved souls swan around feeling happy, though the more active somewhat bored…how do you do occupy yourself for ‘eternity’?

Space missions to planets and amazingly powerful telescopes haven’t come across heaven, and thanks to scientific advance we’re discovering the vast limitless expanse of space. Heaven has still to be found above us, and our spirits will have to travel very fast to reach it if it’s further than we’ve discovered so far.

I might be proved wrong and a camera on board a rocket heading for the sun might shortly send back  pictures of endless rolling hills, clear streams, clean streets, stately homes and chateaux, cake shops, choirs singing and angels plucking at harps, rows of well stocked vegetarian food stalls, sandy beaches, warm calm seas, England winning Test matches, but I doubt it.

God’s up there, Christians have been told for many hundreds of years, along with a neat hierachy of semi human helpers: cherubims, seraphims, angels and saints with special privileges such as front row seats to hear the choirs and quality time discussing serious issues with God. Jesus is up there, at His right hand, as he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven.

Paintings and frescos have depicted these Elysium scenes in wonderfully realistic works of art down the centuries, their creators having no doubt that the firmament they were depicting was real, God and his crew were above us, we were being judged from on high, heaven was waiting for us if we believed, and who in those days before science provided more empirical answers, wouldn’t?

For Muslims, paradise is also tangible as a bounteous bejewelled garden where, notoriously, vast numbers of virgins wait to give solace to martyrs as they arrive.

This is now considered a mistranslation of the original ancient Arabic description, and a good thing too when you think of the moral ambiguity.  But it shows that Islam like Judaism, Christianity and most religions, has created a place with physical properties where our souls, spirits or reconstituted bodies are summoned when we die.

I try to get my head round this, but can’t. I conclude, not with any pleasure, that heaven doesn’t exist. If I accept it’s a metaphysical place, it simply confirms that this definition of heaven is a device used by religions to avoid the inconvenient truth that it’s not there.

This metaphysical destination for our souls by definition has no tangible location, no pearly gates, walls, clouds to sit on. It’s a place that religions create to reassure us that when we die there is more to follow if we are good and obey a God who has not only created where we live but where we’ll go next if we pass whatever test, given final sacraments or are part of the elect. There are all sorts of obtuse rules for our entry to paradise, not surprising really, as it adds to its mystery.

The metaphysical definition of heaven has another problem for me. If heaven isn’t a physical entity, does it have a timespan? Put another way, if heaven doesn’t exist as a place, does it exist in time? When did this metaphysical heaven start to host spirits and souls? At what stage in our evolution did man have a soul? Were we only given souls when we understood the nature of our relationship with God, or when He started his relationship with us?

I don’t believe we started from Adam and Eve, so when during our evolution were we advanced enough in God’s eyes to qualify for entry to heaven? Was heaven rather lonely for the first few thousand years, and is it not uncomfortably overcrowded now?

Silly questions I know, for if it’s a metaphysical place; it’s neither empty nor full, it’s not a real place.

The more I think about it, the less chance I have of  finding heaven.

In recent weeks, Cameron, Hague and now Phillip Hammond, have been patting themselves on the back for the role NATO played in freeing Libya from the tyrannical Gaddafi regime, replacing it with an administration that will be democratic and progressive.
Absolutely nothing will be said about the true situation, described below, which our interference has caused according to a leaked UN report.
That Gaddafi should have been removed from his corrupt and violent leadership, and that a democratic Libyan government is in the interests of the Libyan people and the wider world isn’t open to argument.
What is worrying is the dishonest attitude of our leaders. At the beginning of our involvement, they told the public that NATO bombers would be used to protect the Libyan people from massacre.
This stance quickly became one of assisting the rebels by being their airforce, taking out Gaddafi’s tanks, radar bases, ammunition stores and communications infrastructure.
Not surprisingly, the rebels were victorious in the civil war.
Equally unsurprising are the terrible and inevitable results of this victory.
Groups, armed with looted abandoned weapons, are controlling the streets of many town, settling scores including the murder and torture of black Africans who they think might have been mercenaries hired by a desperate Gaddafi.
Women and their children are being imprisoned and tortured for alleged links to the regime, and in Libya this means being part of the wrong tribe, from the wrong district or wrong Islamic sect.
Oh, and The Report of the Secretary-General on United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) states that: “Although thousands of Manpads (ground to air missiles that can bring down commercial airliners) were destroyed during the seven-month Nato operations, there are increasing concerns over the looting and likely proliferation of these portable defence systems.”
So don’t believe the PR spin being put on our government’s decision to get involved in the Libyan civil war. For as our leaders know, war is bloody, horrible and vicious. Yet how they quickly they joined in, regardless of the human and financial cost, the funerals of innocent people, the ruined lives and the obvious risk of an unstable, divided country replacing Gaddafi’s dreadful regime.

Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President, told the global conference on Afghanistan’s future that international support after foreign forces withdraw in 2014 is crucial if Afghanistan is to remain stable.
Many observers foolishly regard a long-term international commitment to Afghanistan as critical, as Western forces prepare to leave the country by 2014. To date, almost 400 British troops have died in Afghanistan, to add to many more from the US and other allied countries.
Karzai no doubt has his eyes on the £4.5bn a year that ‘experts’ believe is needed if the country is to stay at current levels of development. Up to now, the vast majority of aid money has ended in the bank accounts of his friends and family.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle has said that the objective of the talks is “a peaceful Afghanistan that will never again become a safe haven for international terrorism.”  This goal won’t be reached as neither Pakistan nor the Taliban are taking part. 
I find it amazing that those who believe that Afghanistan can be turned into a peaceful liberal democracy are unwilling to address the following:
1. Afghanistan isn’t a conventional state, but a series of local centres of power run by warlords, Islamists, criminals, elders, many of whom are also locally elected leaders who resent the inefficiency and corruption of Karzai.
2. Afghanistan is made up of two major ethnic groups, the Pashtun and the Tajik, with several smaller groups subdivided into tribes.  Tribes often occupy specific areas such as valley passes and are suspicious and hostile towards other tribes. It is not possible to unify these groups or deal with them as if they are unified.
3. Some of these groups straddle national boundaries and have little loyalty to any nation but to their own group, its customs and beliefs. Their culture has nothing in common with Western values.
4. The Taliban are not interested in international terrorism. They are a loose alliance of Islamist gangs and individuals, many from other countries, who want to fight the occupying forces and install an extreme Islamist code of living, often supported by local tribes and villagers.
5. The border between Afghanistan and Pakistan can’t be closed. It is almost 2000 miles long and much only passable by those who know the mountain passes.
6. Pakistan cannot, even if it wanted to, control the homegrown Islamist militants who want to help their co-religionist zealots in Afghanistan.
7. Afghanistan, like most muslim countries, is divided between a Sunni majority and Shai minority with mutual fear and loathing. 

All the money and armaments in the world won’t change these facts.
So the quicker the West leaves the country to find its own solutions, the better, and also the more successful the solutions will be.

It would pay us to look at the world from the position of Iran if we want to prevent the current conflict escalating.

Let’s then study the map  as if we are sitting in Tehran and ruling Iran.

To the west is Iraq where western forces have twice invaded, the second time hunting down the leadership and putting them on trial resulting in their execution.

To the northwest is the border with Turkey, which seems to be militarily and politically closer to the west than ever before.

And further to the west sits an intransigent and militarily powerful Israel, determined to reduce Iran’s status in the region since its creation after the second world war.

Afghanistan is our eastern neighbour which the west invaded ten years ago in a panic reaction to the September 11 attacks.

On the other side of the Persian Gulf is the region’s dominant power, Saudi Arabia where Sunni Islam predominates. Historically opposed to Iran, where Shi’a Islam is the state religion, and a great supporter of the US, Saudi’s King Abdullah only last year urged the US to ‘cut the head off the snake’ or in other words, weaken Iran by a military strike.

We might then look further east at Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons and which, despite being a far more fertile breeding ground for Islamic terrorists than Afghanistan, is treated with great forbearance by the west.

Our eyes might also alight on North Korea, unpunished despite numerous military excursions and a deliberate policy of destabilising neighbouring countries. We will of course know the extent of Kim Jong-il’s nuclear arsenal.

We probably concluded several years ago that the best way to guarantee Iran’s peace was to have nuclear weapons. After all, wasn’t the possession of nuclear weapons what gave a divided world peace after the second world war? And don’t the US and UK still hold on to an albeit reduced nuclear capability to provide a deterrence?

Looked at like this, it is perfectly rational that Iran develops nuclear weapons, and equally unreasonable for the west to try to stop them. What’s good for the goose must surely be good for the gander.

Why doesn’t our government see the world from Iran’s point of view and discuss and reassure their nervous and fractious leaders that we don’t want a military conflict, that we value peaceful relations, increased trade, greater cultural ties and more strategic agreements?

Why don’t we let the Iranian government and people know we understand their history and rightful position in the region? Why don’t we encourage, support and value their role as a moderating influence in the predominantly Arab and often volatile middle east? In this context the issues of proliferation and nuclear control can be discussed calmly.

The answer is because Mr Hague and Mr Cameron have no idea of how to conduct a long-term, strategic foreign policy to ensure peaceful relations with countries they know little about.

There are few headlines to be garnered from discreet talks, opening new diplomatic channels and offers of targeted aid. Instead they seek the support from the tabloids when they expel diplomats, increase sanctions and before too long I fear, order our bombers to destroy Iranian targets.